Contemporary retail stores compete fiercely to attract new customers to their stores and maintain the store loyalty of their present customers. One mode of attraction is by offering a personalized service which is adapted to meet the particular expectations and needs of each member of a highly diversified clientele. Another mode of attraction is to provide some form of computerization or electronic technology, such as self-scanning systems or POS (point-of-sale) systems, to speed and facilitate the shopping experience.
The existing systems and programs designed to provide the personalized service and shopping facilitation, however, leave a lot to be desired. For instance, although self-scanning systems exist to aid customers to speed the checkout process, a customer may inadvertently scan the same item two or multiple times due to his or her inexperience with the utilization of the system, resulting in the customer having to pay for the same item as many times as the item was scanned. Furthermore, existing self-scanning and POS systems do not aid the actual shopping process. A customer may still continue to spend a considerable amount of time trying to locate the items that need to be purchased. Furthermore, current electronic shopping systems do not aid a customer in taking advantage of all the services available to the customer through the retail store. Accordingly, there is a need for an electronic shopping system that will provide to a customer an enhanced shopping experience while at a retail facility.